How Can Forgiving Someone Else Build My Own Self-Esteem?

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Friedrich Nietzsche, in his book The Geneology of Morals (1887/2009), made a bold statement about forgiveness. He saw it as a weakness, not strength. For Nietzsche, people supposedly forgive because they want something from the other, such as keeping a job even though they hate the boss. They put up with the boss's nonsense for the sake of self-preservation.

This idea of forgiveness as weakness has crept into modern psychology as well. McNulty (2011) published a work entitled The Dark Side of Forgiveness. It is hard to think of a bleaker title. In this work, he presented married couples with hypothetical scenarios and made-up vignettes in which the participants decided whether or not to forgive the spouse if such a situation were to occur. For example, suppose your spouse forgot to mail some important papers or left the house messy. Would you forgive? McNulty found that when a person proclaims forgiveness, the other person interprets it as meaning that what happened was fine, and so it becomes an open door for the offending person to keep being unjust.

With such supposed negativism pointed at forgiving, one wonders if those who forgive end up not liking themselves very much. After all, how easy is it to love a weakling who caves into injustice, especially when the person is oneself? So, the burning question becomes this: When we forgive, are we setting ourselves up for lowered self-esteem and lowered self-respect because we are being weak and letting people take advantage of us?

Here are six points to refute the supposed conclusions above and to conclude that forgiving actually can enhance one’s own self-esteem or self-respect.

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1. As we forgive, we try to see the inherent worth in the one who behaved unjustly.

A significant part of the forgiveness process is to take the time, and even struggle, to see that the one who behaved badly has built-in, or inherent, worth. By this, I mean that the forgiver begins to see that the one who behaved badly is more than the offenses against the forgiver. The offending person, as is the case with all humans, is unique, which makes each person special and irreplaceable.

Such an insight leads to seeing that this person, despite the injustices, possesses a value that cannot be taken away. Once the forgiver grants unconditional inherent worth to the offending person, there is a tendency for the forgiver to generalize this to the conclusion that all people have this worth. It then follows for people who forgive to realize that they, too, must possess this worth that cannot be earned or taken away.

2. As we forgive, we try to “stand in the pain” of what happened so that we do not toss the pain to others.

The decision to bear the pain for the one who behaved badly is heroic. After all, the forgiver is deciding not to retaliate. Instead, the forgiver takes the road less traveled and concludes this: I will not toss that pain back to the other, nor onto unsuspecting others. The further conclusion, then, usually is this: I am stronger than I thought. I can stand up to this pain without it destroying me.

A caveat here is that the forgiver is never to abandon the quest for justice. Yes, stand in the pain, but also ask something of the other. Forgive and seek justice. As forgivers realize how strong they really are, they conclude the opposite of weakness, which can increase their sense of self-worth.

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3. As we forgive on a high moral level, we give a gift to the other, which becomes a gift to the self.

Because forgiveness is a moral virtue, it includes deliberate goodness toward the one who acted badly. Again, this does not invalidate the quest for justice alongside forgiveness. As the person gives a gift to the other, whether it is a smile, a returned phone call, or respectful attention during a discussion, forgivers realize that the gift-giving helps them to feel a sense of happiness, which can increase this sense of happiness even toward the self.

4. As we forgive, we often become more sensitive to the emotional pain of others and want to help them in their pain.

In forgiving, people often find new meaning in their lives. For example, when I talked with a gentleman who was in a correctional institution for life, he related to me that he now has a new meaning in his life. He is committed to helping his cellmates to forgive, possibly leading to a more peaceful life for them. He seemed to like himself more than before because of this new goal.

5. The science of forgiveness, when applied to deeply hurting people, shows just the opposite of “the dark side of forgiveness.”

Here is one example of this science. Lin et al. (2004) randomized 14 people who had substance dependence problems to either a forgiveness intervention or an already-approved intervention by the residential treatment center. After twice-a-week treatment for six weeks, those in the forgiveness condition increased in self-esteem compared with those in the control group. At the four-month follow-up, this increase in self-esteem held. Other forgiveness interventions done with randomized experimental and control groups show similar results (Freedman & Enright, 1996; Reed & Enright, 2006).

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6. The methodology in the forgiveness interventions described above is substantially different from the methods used in the 2011 study.

A major difference between the study done by McNulty (2011) and those done by our group are these: First, we did interventions based on actual injustices against the participants. McNulty's (2011) study used hypothetical stories that were not particularly severe (forgetting to mail a package or having a messy home). Second, ours were actual experiments, while his involved participants filling out questionnaires.

Third, McNulty's (2011) study never asked the participants what they meant by the term "forgiveness." If a participant, for example, defined forgiveness as “just letting it go,” then the researcher actually was not exploring forgiveness but instead a distortion of it. Forgiveness in its true sense lets mercy and justice grow up together; forgive and ask for fairness.

In conclusion, the forgiveness process has rational explanations of why people should increase in self-esteem when they work on examining issues of inherent worth, bear the pain for the other, give gifts to the unjust, and find important meaning in their suffering. It is anything but absurd to see that as people forgive others, it is the forgivers who benefit in increasing self-esteem.